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Netflix has decided to ax a Facebook-based social tool that allowed users to rate movies and TV shows and share their opinions with friends, saying that users showed little interest in the offering. Netflix's social media troubles, along with the failure of Apple's Ping service, highlight the problem with themed networks tied to a single content provider, writes Jared Newman. "Social networks like Ping or Netflix 'Friends' aren't natural. They're a forced conversation that very few people want to have," Newman writes.

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Too many companies are effectively ignoring their single biggest social media asset: their own workers. There are risks involved when your workers go social, writes Jeremy Epstein, but the odds are that they're already active on social platforms -- so you might as well make the most of their influence. "We all know that social media tools aren't going away, so let's embrace it," Epstein writes.

Social media is making the top-down approach to management obsolete, and that's affecting the way companies conceive of themselves and treat their workers, writes Soren Gordhamer. By giving every worker a voice, social media increases the importance of an inclusive and innovative corporate culture, and of leaders articulating a powerful vision of their company's big-picture goals, Gordhamer writes. "The old paradigm was individualistic and focused on thriving to be personally brilliant; the new one is much more social, and it involves creating cultures that enhance innovation in all those present," he writes.

North Korea has a social media propaganda unit aimed at South Korean Web users -- but so far the communist regime's tweets and YouTube clips have failed to gain traction with its southern neighbor. The problem is that the content is too grounded in North Korean propaganda tactics to have appeal abroad, experts note. "Why don't Kim Jong Il's propaganda officials do more to tailor propaganda to South Korean sensibilities? The reason is that they are too caught up in the nationalist personality cult to put themselves in an outsider's shoes," B.R. Myers writes.

A site called Jdeal aims to use a Groupon-style business model to harness the collective purchasing power of New York City's Jewish population. The service will focus on providing discounts for kosher services, such as entry to a comedy venue serving kosher desserts. Membership increased from 1,000 to 5,000 during a six-week period, and the company is planning to expand to seven other cities, officials say.

A growing number of tools and widgets help social media marketers measure the impact of their campaigns and the influence of their followers. Klout is the most widely used, and appears likely to continue to dominate in 2011, according to this article. Still, it's worth checking out tools such as PeerIndex and Twitalyzer, which offer subtly different approaches to measuring social media impact, Chelsi Nakano writes.